The SkyLine Series Box Set, page 35
part #1 of SkyLine Series
“You…will never…be…” Caullen tried to roar, though it left him as more of a gargle. Words became impossible for him, with the black tar seeping through his lips.
In the middle of the chaos, Donellanus pulled his chair out at last. He took his spot at the head of the table. No longer was it the seat of the Chairman. Donellanus settled into his throne, the King come home at last.
The Jupiter base was quieter that night than it had been since the Faders built it. Donellanus sat firmly planted on his throne until every last Dragon had left. For the first time in months, he took a stroll to the top of the base. There was an observation deck there, a place the Faders had built for their lords to enjoy the hot breeze of Jupiter’s clouds. Donellanus stood alone there, a single shadow in the ever-lashing color. He stared up at the bobbing protrusion of an unfinished tower. Mankind’s futile attempt to find a hypothetical surface of Jupiter. Soon, it would build itself down far enough for them to see the Dragons’ base. There would be no point by then, as Machaeus often reminded him.
“Sir,” Caullen said through his compliantly gritted teeth. Donellanus hardly gave him the courtesy of half a turn.
“What news, dear friend?” asked Donellanus.
“Dormis and his most trusted Faders are en route to Mercury. As you commanded,” Caullen told him.
“And yet, you still don’t understand why?” Donellanus picked from his newly loyal servant’s brain. Machaeus had given him access to the minds of all ensnared by its dark touch.
“I’m afraid not,” Caullen admitted, knowing the futility of lying now.
“Let me make it as clear for you as it is for me,” Donellanus said. He paced over, calmly, to rest a claw on Caullen’s tense shoulder.
“The Universe is on a course that will tear it apart. It is, in no small part, our fault. The only thing that can save it now is returning it to a time before it was so doomed. We will restore it to conditions before humans or Dragons tainted it so,” Donellanus told him.
“But…how?”
“The same way it was formed in the first place,” Donellanus shrugged, “Bang!” Caullen flinched away from so acute a sound. His King only wandered back to the edge of the viewing platform, to gaze into Jupiter’s boundless stormwinds. It took Caullen a few seconds to work himself up to submitting his second, more urgent report, especially after hearing so heavy a divination of his future.
“Also…earlier, in the chaos… The prisoner, Drogan… he…”
“He finally slipped his bindings?” Donellanus chuckled, now that he saw it the way Machaeus did.
“I’m afraid he escaped,” Caullen nodded. He winced away from the eight-hundred possible reactions his King might have. Nothing could have prepared him for the one Donellanus actually had. He laughed. Hard. Through bucks of his chest, he managed to say:
“No, he hasn’t.”
Chapter Fifteen: Seven Tears
Kalus waited outside the door to the Captain’s back office. His knuckles slid against the smooth wood, unwilling to knock. He let his head droop in a listless moment of hesitation. He already knew what was waiting for him on the other side. He’d known the second Demi asked him to come back there, by the quaver in his voice. Only hours after his duel with Donellanus, Kalus found himself even more frightened. Now, he took up a fist in place of swords. He rapped it once against the hardwood door.
“In,” his Captain’s voice called him. Kalus twisted the knob, pushed through, and pulled the door shut behind him in a single motion. He dragged his boots until his toes hit the front of Demi’s desk. Kalus stood in wait for the lashing. “That was about the stupidest thing I think I’ve ever seen you do. That should say quite a lot.”
“That it does,” Kalus admitted. He forced his eyes up, to meet his Captain head on. “Sometimes my job calls me to do stupid things.”
“Don’t you try to justify it,” Demi struck back, fist clenched against his desktop. Kalus broke his stiff form only for the slightest of shrugs.
“It’s not about justifying it. My role in this unit is to protect you and the others from close-range threats. That’s exactly what I did,” Kalus objected.
“Within reason, Kalus!” Demi roared. his hands slammed down on his desk hard enough to topple his Captain’s plaque. “You shouldn’t have taken on the King of Dragons alone! Especially not after I explicitly ordered you not to!”
“I’m sorry, Demi. I don’t know what to tell you besides it’s-”
“From now on, your job is to keep your name off my conscience! I never want to visit your grave, Kalus. Do you understand me?” Demi demanded. Blood funneled through every pronounced vein in his face, brightening it to a hot red. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Kalus muttered. The color drained from Demi’s face with the resignation of his Arms Master. His hands slid across his desk in a struggle to hold himself upright. Suddenly he was weak. For the first time since they’d set out, Demi let one of his crew see what he hid behind that office door. That, sometimes, he was weak as any normal human.
“I can’t take it again, you hear me?” Demi whispered. His voice shuddered, a mask of sound threatening to shatter any second. It would let loose the flood of all the agony he’d swallowed - a vomit of twenty years’ regret.
“Again?” Kalus asked. His brows curved up, his voice tinged with real concern.
“When I first started working for the WCC…there were still resistance groups on Earth, people opposed to a central world government. Could you imagine, with the way things are now?” So lost in the flood of memory, Demi actually chuckled. Head hung low, he didn’t notice Kalus sit on the edge of his desk to listen. He might as well have been talking to the air. And yet, no, Demi would never have shared such secrets, even with the air, if it had been anyone else in the room with him. “I was part of an undercover unit. I was assigned to infiltrate a group called Blue Terra.” Then Demi went quiet. The next part caught on its way up his throat. In all the years it had sat in the pit of his gut, the words themselves had grown barbs.
“I’ve heard of them,” Kalus said, to release his Captain from the heaviness of the quiet. Some of the Blue Terra had been the first miners of Saturn’s rings, interplanetary pilgrims in search of a new home.
“I was good at my job,” Demi forced out. With those six words, something snapped inside him. Suddenly he couldn’t keep down what he could never spit out. “I had the leaders convinced, without many violent protests, that I was entirely devoted to the cause. They made me a recruiter, which was exactly the goal the WCC had in mind for me.”
“I had a direct line to the inflow of bodies to the Blue Terra. Of course, I could only set up a small percentage of the new recruits to be captured, without arousing suspicion. I was authorized to use any means necessary to gain the unreserved trust of these newbloods. Do you understand? Any means.” Kalus sat upright on the desk to listen. He didn’t realize it was a genuine question until Demi glared right at him.
“I-I understand,” Kalus stammered.
“Violence. Drugs. Sex - with men and women alike. Whatever eased the minds of the most dangerous recruits, the Blue Terra’s potential new leaders. The worst was genuine emotional connection. I had to get to know these sons of bitches, until they just looked like people again. People who made a few core choices differently than me, and ended up on a different path. Then I turned them over to the WCC.”
“One day, they assigned me an up-and-coming bomber. He’d caught the attention of the Blue Terra with high-energy Chrysum explosives… The WCC branded him extremely dangerous. But Reggie… He wasn’t even sure he wanted to join the Blue Terra. He’d set off explosives mostly as a vigilante in the war-torn countryside of Germany. The WCC and Blue Terra only knew him for his explosives. I knew him for who he was. He was good. He was trying to do right. And I…” Demi’s hands clenched tight enough to shake both of his arms. He clammed up until a gentle caress of fingers pierced his trance. Kalus’ hands on his own.
“Hey, it’s alright. You say what you’ve got to say. It doesn’t leave this office,” he assured his Captain. Then again, no - the roles had vanished between the two yet again. Kalus held the hand of his friend - a man he respected as much as loved - and listened.
“I thought I could help him. I thought, if I turned him over, the WCC might cut him a deal. His cooperation for a lesser sentence, rehabilitation. Maybe they’d even offer him a job with them. Shit, was I dumb for him. If it’d been any other recruit, I wouldn’t have been so blinded by hope. For…love. Like I said before, the WCC only saw Reggie for his skills. When I walked him out of the Blue Terra compound for a smoke that night…there was a sniper on the hill. It…it didn’t even make a sound.”
“The only sound was Reggie, becoming a body on the ground. A kind of folding, then a thump. I kneeled right in the blood. All of my training. All of my experience. I should have known right away he was gone. It was over. But, it was him. It couldn’t be. I wanted so badly to pick him up. To shake him. To scream at him not to go. But…some part of me knew I was in the sniper’s scope. I knew that kneeling to mourn him was already borderline treason. If I did anything more, they would have thought I was corrupt, taken in by the Blue Terra. They might have put a bullet through me just then… Instead, I got up. I wiped away exactly five tears. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. And that was that.”
“That…was not that,” Kalus said, about twenty seconds later. He gave Demi time to quiver. Time to cry, scream or launch the contents of his desk across the room. Demi had done none of these, nothing, but sit up straight and stare into nothing. “You carried it with you all this time. It’s affected every decision you made.”
“For better or worse,” Demi muttered. He unclamped his fist of sore fingers. Without the constant tension of the story inside him, he found himself suddenly sore down to the splinters of his bones.
“I couldn’t tell you which one,” Kalus said. Now Demi’s hand was open, he slipped his fingers in the natural gaps. “I can tell you you’re a spectacular leader in spite of it. You’ve exceeded every poor example set for you by double, and more. I don’t think another Captain could have turned us into Dogs of War.”
“I… Thank you,” Demi smiled, despite the streaks of water that rolled down his cheeks. One from each eye made a total of seven tears since the silent shot that had changed him. Demi wiped his face dry before he could lose track. “Do you see, now? The time we shared on Saturn, after you and Lilia saved us from the Dragons… That was physical. What we have now… It’s too dangerous to let it develop further. I won’t put you in the danger of being loved by me.” Kalus tilted his head down toward Demi. He cocked him a daring eyebrow.
“Captain. In case you’ve forgotten this about me: I excel in dangerous situations,” Kalus smirked. He scooted close to Demi on the edge of the desk. He slid Demi’s hand into both of his own, on his lap.
“As if you would let me,” Demi smirked. He tightened his hands around Kalus’. “There’s no way to actually change your mind, is there?” Kalus applied the slightest pull, to probe for willingness. Demi rose with the rug. He stepped closer to Kalus. The sides of their legs brushed together. In a single movement, Demi and Kalus shared a wordless understanding.
“No, there is,” Kalus told him. “You already have.” He moved one of his hands from Demi’s to his waist. He pulled his Captain in between two open legs. Kalus closed the vice of his thighs surprisingly strong for so thin a man, locking Demi’s waist against his own. He had to stare up to find his Captain’s hazel eyes. Stare he did, right up until the second Kalus’ lips trapped Demi’s.
The entire ship seemed to shift around them with the tremors of passion, so suddenly released. The air heated by twenty degrees. The desk rocked back just slightly with the thrust of Demi’s hips. A hand slid down, over his pants, to the mass of his throbbing excitement. Kalus rounded the shaft to pull it up, against the inside of his own leg. Demi pressed forward hard, while tongues sparred between the walls of pressed lips. Kalus felt his partner’s pulses of pleasure as clear as his own when he squeezed Demi into himself with his legs. Demi leaned back to unbutton the top of Kalus’ shirt. He made it down three buttons before the crackle of the PA stopped them faster than an electric shock.
“Attention, all Dogs of War,” Sophia’s voice filled the room through speakers in the wall. “Please report to the deck to discuss our next destination…like we were supposed to ten minutes ago. Please.”
“Right… The meeting,” Kalus smirked when he peeled his lips back from Demi’s neck.
“This was…supposed to be a quick scolding, damn you,” Demi chuckled. He buttoned Kalus’ shirt back up, then retreated to straighten out his own uniform. Kalus ran his fingers backward through his hair to restyle it.
In moments, they were Captain and Arms Master again. Captain and Arms Master who stole one last kiss before they left the office.
Chapter Sixteen: Firestorm
The Dogs of War were no closer to a decision of what to do about the coordinates imprinted on Kalus’ arm hours after they’d started their belated meeting. After trying Marcus for the fifth time to no response, the decision rested with them. They were divided down the middle, with Kalus and Sophia on the side of charging the Dragon base as their mission dictated, and Demi and Lilia counseling caution. Troubling as the words of Donellanus had been, it wasn’t quite enough to convince them his invitation wasn’t the bait for an ambush. That left the ultimate power of decision in the hands of Howard, the tiebreaker. The rest of the Dogs awaited his answer in person for a full thirty minutes before finally disbanding with the agreement to regroup and hear what he eventually decided. He had two more days to consider the options and decide, before the Cerberus arrived at Jupiter. Either way Howard swung, they had another trade route to establish, from the SkyLine to the Gas Giant.
Everyone awaited his answer at the briefing before they launched the new SkyLine branch. Everyone was disappointed when he said he never agreed to answer before the trade route mission. They begrudgingly agreed to give the researcher until after the operation was complete to decide. He did, after all, have the most experience with Dragons, and so would break the tie with the most informed decision. So, in the meantime, Sophia launched her craft, lined up the Launcher and shot a new stream of nanomachines into the side of the SkyLine.
“Hey, Lil. What’s the Launch Station look like on Jupiter?” Kalus called to his sister through his earpiece from the deck. He leaned out over the rail of the Cerberus to scan the enormous yellow-orange planet with his binoculars. The floating city of Nimbus was fairly easy to spot, considering it was the only break in the solid, flat color of Jupiter’s dense clouds.
“It’ll probably be a little taller than most others. It’ll have a big black ring held up by two posts on the roof,” Lilia described.
Kalus scanned the city, a hundred steel towers not unlike the skyscrapers from the Earth city of Rome around the Coliseum. Each one was connected to the others around it by steel-framed footbridges of condensed particles from Jupiter’s whipping clouds. The bridges were built in segments, able to bend and twist with the slight bob of the floating buildings inside the WCC’s biggest terradome yet. Well, without solid ground to support the city, it was more like a terrasphere. The same eggshell-colored shield that kept Jupiter’s harsh winds and crushing gravity from getting in kept Nimbus functioning with comfortable, localized artificial gravity to replicate a city on the ground as best it could.
“Eyes on,” Kalus said when he spotted it. As Lilia had said, the Launch Station stretched well past the other buildings around it. His eyes climbed it to the receptor ring, waiting in tilt for the new SkyLine branch. It was there Kalus’ eyes jumped to next, the growing tube of darkness under Sophia’s control. She unrolled it from the existing SkyLine toward the Jupiter before his eyes, toward Nimbus. Kalus’ eyes flitted from the nanomachines to the receptor ring. “A little right, Soph,” Kalus told her. “And higher.”
“Higher?” Sophia echoed. She squinted through the interface projected over her craft’s viewing screen.
“You might not be able to see from there, but the buildings rise and fall, subtly. Trust…” Kalus trailed off when his eyes caught sight of something, just to the left of the Launch Station. A column of gray smoke billowed up from one of the lower buildings.
“Trust what? Get your head out of your ass, Kalus! Are we lined up?” Sophia called back to him. Kalus’ eyes shot over to the nanomachines, unfolding toward the receptor ring.
“You’re golden. But the city…” Kalus searched the surrounding buildings up and down. He caught sight of the source flame just before another blasted the glass from the windows of a nearby building.
“Kalus, are you seeing what I’m picking up?” Lilia gasped from the bridge.
“I see fire. What are you picking up?” Kalus asked.
“Dragons…and others, maybe Faders… They’re everywhere,” Lilia muttered. Her fingers trembled inches away from the endless life signature blips consuming her console. “SkyLine connected… Energy synchronizing. But I can’t connect to the engineers.”
“Then who’s running the program?” Sophia countered while she pulled her ship back close to the Cerberus.
“The engineers are just a safeguard. The SkyLine link-up is an automatic program… If there’s anyone in the Launch Station, they’re too busy to talk to us,” Lilia shuddered. Kalus clutched the rail of the ship with one hand, the other sweeping his binoculars across the city of Nimbus. Fire twisted across walkways and puffed up floating towers before his eyes. It was hard to distinguish the shadows inside them from so far away, as bodies, rubble or winged beasts.
“Dammit…Demi, can we reach Marcus?” Kalus growled.
“He’s still not responding,” Demi answered.
